can have no hope in the life and immortality revealed in the Gospel. But once so united, all our works, proceeding from his meritorious life as their principle, and done for him as their end, partake of his merit, and, through his infinite love, are meritorious of the reward of heaven. We can then render all the natural virtues supernatural and meritorious. A cup of cold water, given to a child from motives of supernatural charity, ensures a supernatural reward. Patriotism, which, in the natural order, is only a natural virtue, the Christian, who loves and serves his country in Christ, and for Christ's sake, raises to the rank of a supernatural virtue, meriting a supernatural reward. So of all the natural virtues, performed from Christ, in him, and for him, they are all elevated to the rank of the supernatural order.

The Calvinist fails to recognize the Christian order of life, by failing to recognize sacramental grace as a divinely infused principle of action. Regarding the grace of regeneration as operating forensically, and denying it to be an infused virtue, elevating man to the supernatural order, and regarding man, in all the operations of grace, as purely passive, as acted upon, and not as acting, he can recognize in man no principle of merit, because he can recognize in him no virtue, no human activity. The principle of merit in man is not nature; it is not something born with us, in natural generation, but it is grace infused into our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which supernaturalizes our nature, making it, what theologians call, natura elevata. This grace is not merited by our works, but has been purchased for us, and is freely given us by our Lord. He has merited it, not we, and he gives it to us, not as a reward of merit, but as the principle of merit. We have not merited it, but by it we are enabled to perform acts meritorious of eternal life. All our merit flows from grace, and therefore has its first cause and principle in the merits of Christ. Hence, he says, without me ye can do nothing-and it is true. We can do nothing without grace,-prayers, almsdeeds, spiritual and corporal works of mercy are meritori

ous by virtue of this new principle of life; but as this principle is grace which flows from the God-man through the cross, it is plain, that, in asserting their merit, we no more make void the merits of Christ, or reject the cross, than we deny the creative power of God by saying he has created us active beings. We assert no merit out of the merits of Jesus Christ, and it is false to allege that we put good works in the place of grace, when it is only by virtue of grace we can perform good works. According to the Catholic, the grace of regeneration is not a mere external and transitory act of the Holy Ghost, but the infusion of an interior, habitual, and permanent principle of a new and higher life, and therefore, a man may always act from grace as the principle of supernatural life, as he acts from natural reason and affection, as the principle of his natural life, and the merit of his acts done from grace is his merit, because, though done from grace and for grace, they are done from a principle made his by the infused gift of God, and also by the assent of his understanding and the cooperation of his will, through grace assisting. If the Calvinist understood the sacramental grace he denies, and that, flowing from the cross and infused into us, it is in us the principle of the new and higher life, he would see that we defend, to say the least, as much as he professes to do the merits of Christ, and that all his charges against us are false and absurd. In simple truth, it is he who rejects the Christian economy of salvation, not the Catholic.

We can do nothing towards our salvation till we are regenerated, for we must be born into the Christian life before we can live it. But how can we be born into this life? The Calvinist is here wholly at fault,-has no fixed and regular order by which one can be regenerated or enter into this life. Confounding regeneration with conversion or change of disposition and affection, he recognizes no human activity in the fact of turning to God; he compels the sinner to await the moving of the Spirit, and to depend entirely on the irresistible grace of God. Suppose the man, in the order of nature alone, to be fully convinced

of the reality of the Christian order of life, and of the fact that he can secure heaven only by living it; how is he to be born into it? He can do nothing, he can make no step in advance, but must wait till God chooses to work a miracle in his behalf. Then, again, all life needs sustentation, and how is your Calvinist to sustain his Christian life, supposing that by a miracle he is born into it? He has no answer to either question. God is wise, and works by rule and measure; all his works are perfect. He leaves. nothing unprovided for. He sends his grace to excite, move, and aid the will to approach the sacrament of baptisin, in which, by the grace, always attached to the sacrament, one is cleansed from his sins, and introduced into the Christian order of life, and united by the living bond of charity to Christ the head. Here is the door through which whoever will may enter into the new order of life, and become a member of Christ. By the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, he who will may find the sustentation his life needs, the very flesh and blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord himself, and in that of Penance, the means of recovering the life lost, of being reconciled and united to God anew in the bonds of charity. For all the wants of this supernatural life, from its inception here to its expansion into the beatific life of heaven, God provides by these and the other sacraments, which are not, any of them, mere rites or ceremonies, but real channels or mediums of grace. All is preserved, provided for, and the means of being born again, of entering into life, and securing heaven, are placed within the reach of every man; and while all flows from God and honors his grace, the freedom of man and the merit of good works are preserved in the order of grace as they are in the order of nature. In other words, though Jesus Christ is the First Cause, he creates man a second cause in the order of grace, as he originally created him a second cause in the order of nature. Hence, a man is saved by grace, yet not without good works; for grace leaves a man his free will, at the same time that it becomes in him the principle of merit.

The Rev. C. Malan understands nothing of all this, and in his blindness rejects it. But let us read on:

"The old man had not yet understood me; he did not see his error; for at my question, if he thought the pardon of sins and life eternal was a free gift of the goodness of God, he answered me without hesitation:

"I have no other persuasion, and that is my faith. Certainly salvation is a gift of God; and I do not think any man can be saved otherwise than by Him who died upon the Cross.' I should have been surprised to find this inconsistency in a man whose language and manners showed a mind of much intelligence and cultivation, if I had not perceived in what he said, the same reasoning I had used myself, and which is so often used by Christians in our day.

"In truth, if we ask the greater part of those who profess to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, what is their hope of eternal safety, they will answer almost, without exception, that they expect the mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ, and that it is in order to acquire it, and to make themselves worthy of it, at least as much as that is permitted to men, that they frequent churches, that they fulfill the duties of religion, that they dispense their alms, and that they abstain from all wrong conduct.

"That is to say-on one hand they use the words Saviour, mercy, free pardon, the gift of heaven, but on the other they study to merit and to gain by themselves this forgiveness of sins and this unspeakable happiness. They thus imitate the folly of the released debtor, who gloried that his king, in person, had freed him from all debt, but who, notwithstanding, hoarded even his bread and water, lest, said he, he should be imprisoned, if he did not pay all himself.

"Such was the error of the old man. I wished to show it to him; but I thought if he could first declare it more plainly, the truth would afterwards strike him with greater force,―a necessary precaution in a case of this kind; for if one shows the pupil, in drawing, the beauty of a model, and assists him in copying it, before he has well understood the faults and deformities of his own design, it is to be feared he may afterwards feel some regret at having destroyed what he at first drew with so much satisfaction, and which in his eyes compared favorably with the work of his master."-pp. 15–17.

We e see no error on the side of the old man in this. Salvation implies pardon of sin, but the simple pardon of sin is not all that is meant by salvation, because the end contemplated by the Incarnation is not simply pardon of sin, or the reparation of the damage done by sin, but in pardoning sin, if you will, the elevation of man to a new and higher order of life than that in which he was created. The error is on the part of the Calvinist, who denies this order of life, and fails to understand the Catholic doctrine. The Catholic does not understand how a man, come to the use of reason, can be saved, can enter into the kingdom prepared for the blessed, even though he has been born into the new life, unless he lives that life, and elicits the acts of faith, hope, and charity. A man may have been born again, may be a Christian, and yet, unless he lives the Christian life, keeps the commandments, and does whatever the Gospel requires of him, not be permitted to enter into the joys of heaven, or be finally saved. A man by natural generation is ushered into natural life, but he is not entitled to natural beatitude, unless he keeps the law of that life. So in the supernatural order. We do not by our works attempt to do what Christ has done, or to pay the debt he has paid or forgiven us, but we attempt to secure to ourselves the benefits of what he has done, so that in our case it shall not turn out that he has died in vain. Throughout the whole Tract we find this same fundamental error of Calvinism, that man is not and cannot be, in the order of grace, an active creature or second cause; and this comes from the fact that Calvinism denies him to be a second cause or a free activity even in the natural order. Calvinism, under one aspect, is a revival of Manichæanism or Oriental Dualism, and, under another, simple pantheism. According to it, under the latter aspect, all our actions are simply divine operations, and modern Transcendentalism, which divinizes all our natural instincts, and identifies even our lusts with the interior operations of the Holy Spirit, -a doctrine which meets us in nearly every contemporary novel or romance,—is only a logical development of Evan